Junkyard Find: 1990 Range Rover Classic
Denver drivers love their luxury SUVs, and European luxury vehicles tend to depreciate in a hurry. This means plenty of Land Rovers show up in the area’s big self-service wrecking yards. While this is good news for the several Coloradans who might be interested in finding a Rover V8 to drop into a homegrown MGB-GT V8, I don’t pay much attention to these trucks. IHC Scouts, sure, and maybe the occasional Jeep Cherokee get into this series, but I have walked right by hundreds of discarded British status-boxes and not paid much attention.
A Range Rover with 266,666 miles on the clock, though, is another story.
Only 400,000 more miles to reach the onramp of the Highway To Hell!
In 1990, having a hardwired analog “car phone” with external antenna was still a big deal, so much so that you could buy phony stick-on antennae. Adding one to roll-up door glass seems like a poor decision, but maybe this one exists solely for attaching Broncos-colors ribbons.
I’m willing to bet that the original purchaser of this $38,575 truck (close to 72 grand in inflation-adjusted 2017 dollars) would sooner have snorted up a line of fire ants than slap a sticker on the front door.
The contrast between gauzy brochure photograph and gritty junkyard reality couldn’t be much greater than this. A young 24 Hours of LeMons founder Jay Lamm went on the Great Divide Expedition press event for the 1990 Range Rover, back when he was a young automotive journalist, and wound up obliterating one in a rollover crash while trying to catch Malcolm Smith on a Rocky Mountain dirt path, but this interesting fact gets no mention in the Great Divide Edition brochure.
Members of this engine family were made for nearly 50 years. Lots of weird plot twists in the Buick 215/Rover V8 story.
“It has established for itself an enviable position in the automotive world.”
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I owned a '95 from 2013 to 2015 and commuted 45 minutes each way into downtown DC every single day. Last year for the Classic. Never left me stranded, and always started on the first turn of the key! I carefully tracked my mpg, and averaged about 9.5 in my usual commute, but managed to eek out 13 or so on pure highway trips. The HVAC was amazing. But I had my share of electrical gremlins, with frequent trouble with switches working one day but not the next. I would own another in a heartbeat... There is just a very special feeling you get from behind the wheel.
My 1990 Range Rover is tied with 1982 Chevy Citation X11 as the worst cars I have ever owned.